Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (10 page)

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Copyright © 2013 by Helen Jackson

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Helen Jackson
likes making stuff up
and eating cake. She’s lucky enough to live in Edinburgh, her
favourite city. Her stories have been published in the anthologies
Rocket Science
and
ImagiNation: Stories of Scotland
’
s Future
, and in
Daily Science
Fiction
. Visit helen-jackson.com for more information.

* * * * *

by George
Zebrowski

Illustrations for
The Genoa Passage
by Martin Hanford

THE GENOA PASSAGE

I told myself that they would have to be
fakes. At worst, it would be a good hike; forewarned, I would not
be fooled.

“I will take you to the places,” he said,
“and you will pay me later, or not at all.”

He gave me a rifle and said that two other
people would come with us.

Earlier, he had recited a pretty good tour
guide spiel, how from 1945 to 1950 a route through the mountains
from Germany down to the port of Genoa here in Italy had been used
by Nazi war criminals, with papers forged for them by
anti-Bolshevik Fascist Catholic Italian priests who feared the
Soviet Union’s post-war takeover of Eastern Europe and in time the
rest of the world, and imagined that the surviving Reichmasters
would escape and form a necessary resurgent German power against
Stalin – or there would be no one to stand against him, given the
left’s blindness to the betrayal of their socialist ideals, which
had never been any good anyway because they denied free market
capitalism’s morality play of winners and losers, of rewards and
punishments here and now and not in the life beyond.

This much was true, and I understood it very
well, but the guide told it with a touch of irony and disdain that
piqued my curiosity while making it difficult to judge what he
thought about it. The escapees’ enablers, Roman Catholic Franciscan
priests, were fact in the public record, never contradicted or much
discussed, for various reasons, by the Allied nations that had won
the war against Hitler. Very old news.

“
So you’ll just show me
their route?” I asked.

“
No, no,” he said, “much
more than that,” his face stuck between a smile and a
scowl.

“
More than what?” I asked,
puzzled.

“
They’re still there,” he
said softly, rubbing his dark eyebrows, “along the
passage.”

“
What do you mean?” I
asked, amused.

“
The pass,” he said,
“splits things up. Not reliably, but often enough to be of
interest…to some people.”

“
You mean to me?” I asked.
“Why?”

“
They killed your family,
did they not?” he asked, suddenly gazing at me with undeniable
conviction. “As you told me – no?”

We had talked at breakfast in the resort
hotel, where I had stopped for some lazy time in my walking tour,
and he had taken me for a likely mark.

“
Well, yes, but long ago,
as I told you, in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century. My
grandparents, actually.” I had no idea why I had told him anything;
too much free time sometimes made me babble.

“
Yes, but the…killers are
still there, in the pass,” he said, open faced, like a
child.

“
Still there?” I asked.
“This is 2016. Who are you talking about?”

“
As many of them that went
through that way are still there. Eichmann and Bormann, and many
others, to be met as often as we want to go hunting.”

“
Hunting?” I asked, annoyed
by his provocation; he knew how to do it.

He said, “But if you like, you can only
watch them be killed.”

“
Watch, killed?” I asked.
He was insane.

“
The others will shoot if
you do not wish to do so.”

“
Others?” Even
worse.

“
The living who still want
it.”

“
Want what?” I
asked.

“
To hunt those who fled.
Thousands escaped. Only thirty thousand of some one hundred fifty
thousand war criminals were ever caught or tried. Too much trouble
to catch and try.”

“
Yes,” I said, aware of
that much, “it was a thankless task.” Satisfying to catch, I told
myself, only in the most private of circumstances of delusional
revenge. No one knew how many of these personal executions took
place, or how many were mistakes, but I didn’t want to discuss it
with him. I’d had enough of it with my survivor parents when they
were alive, who had never been able to forget the tragedies of
their lost parents, the grandparents I had never had a chance to
know; worse when I found out that my biological parents and two
brothers had been killed, and that the parents I knew had adopted
me without papers and had decided never to tell me.

But it got out, through an uncle who was not
an uncle and who told me before he died; dust in his lungs from
working in a metalworking mill stopped his heart one day; only a
month earlier he had told me in a drunken stupor. Both my adoptive
parents were dead by then, and he increased their number by telling
me about my lost originals.

I went on a walking tour of a warming Europe
in 2016, living on money market earnings which ran up to twenty
percent in that decade. Maybe I thought I could walk off the past’s
irritants, drain them from my brain through my feet. I saw the
metal dust in my uncle’s lungs, slowly working its way to kill him
as he lamented the loss of his wife and son in the Hitlerian war,
and the uselessness of his unverifiable economics doctorate in
America.

A shadow had fallen across my insides with
that strange uncle’s death, and I had no idea of how to rid myself
of its pall, except that I knew that it would lure me back to the
locale of my birth, from which I had been exported to New York
City, naturalized into citizenship so I could claim my college
scholarship, Americanized into ideals that were already bleeding to
death by the time the constitution had been adopted in 1789.
Slavery and the Indian genocide built a country still in denial,
chained to its past, still ill with immigrant enemies, as stained
with human blood as anywhere else on earth.

It was my shadowy inner landscape that had
attracted the tour guide, a curious, thoughtful man, I told myself,
who read my melancholy expression and body language, and knew a
sucker when he saw one.

His story was a lie on the face of it, but
matched to my mood and personal history by an observant con man.
What could I lose by going along for the show, which I would not
even have to pay for up front, if ever?

It was a smooth ride north, in an expensive
air-conditioned and well-shocked black Rolls-Royce. I sat in the
stressed suspension with a quiet old man and woman. The guide was
up front with the driver. Business must have been good for the
guide to have a vintage vehicle.

We did not speak, as if on our way to a
funeral or an execution, which in a sense was true. My companions
in the facing seats were well past their sixties, maybe much older,
but fit and booted for hiking out of a past that was not yet past.
Their gray, well preserved faces held more than could ever be said.
Their staring silence knew my youth.

Outside the windows the beautiful landscape
was ever more hilly as we neared the mountains. Gnarly trees, mossy
rocks, goat trails, and streams, a stone house here and there all
clung to a steepening that might roll up and over the blue sky,
past the zenith and down the other side, as if the world was the
inner surface of a hollow sphere.

An amnesiac concentration locked me into a
scanning, predatory patience, as if waiting to be confirmed in lost
truths.

The guide had told me of his long walks in
this landscape, where he had stumbled upon the historied infinity
of branching pasts, and I had told myself that only a lunatic would
believe in the discovery that had given him the way in which he now
earned his living.

Still, however vengeful the suckers, he
would have to deliver something to get paid. But what could he ever
deliver? Once he was paid, I imagined that he might kill us in some
seclusion of mossy rocks, but reminded myself that he had not asked
to be paid in advance or out here.

We reached what seemed an arbitrary
destination and got out. The driver stayed with the car. The guide
led the way.

The old man and woman walked ahead of me on
the narrow hot dusty trail, with high-powered rifles over their
shoulders. I had refused the weapon offered to me, but I felt it
pulling at me from inside the car.

Our guide stopped and pointed, then came
back to my side.

I peered ahead, but could not see the
figures coming toward us. The couple unshouldered their rifles. The
guide handed me his binoculars.

I put them to my eyes and fixed on the
figure of a man. He shimmered as if through a mass of heated air,
and for several moments held still between one instant and the
next, in the way that an analog clock’s second hand seems to
hesitate when you stare at it too long, as if it will never find
the next moment.

A guide moved ahead of a man I recognized
from the album of mugshots which my guide kept for his customers.
All the faces had a look about them that was unmistakable to an
informed viewer.

“
It’s him!” the old woman
rasped, wheezing in the hot morning air, and for an instant I felt
that she would die of heaving.

Then silently, they both raised their rifles
and fired, and the figure’s head exploded into a watermelon red as
the shots echoed and he fell backwards.

His guide turned to look back and stood
transfixed, then fled back up the trail, and seemed to fade
away.

The old couple sighed and stared, and
trembled as if about to collapse, but held steady.

My guide’s face was without expression as he
led us back, and I could not help feeling deprived; there had been
no one here for me to kill today.

Back at the hotel, I tried to absorb the
fact that I had watched Adolph Eichmann die, so many decades after
his well documented execution in Israel.

At dinner with the guide I asked, “So how do
you do it?”

He rubbed his unshaven face, sipped some
wine, and said, “Not to be missed, eh?”

“
Is it some kind
of…therapy?” I asked foolishly. You could do as much with a story,
play, or movie, but not in reality…

He acted as if he knew me better than I knew
myself; but I could only imagine actors and marks. The guide’s
business was built on vivid staging, I told myself, nothing
more.

“
How often do you do this?”
I asked.

“
As often as anyone
wishes,” he said. “You’ll see tomorrow.”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
Better you’ll see for
yourself.”

“
Will I have to pay to go
again?”

“
If you wish,” he said, “or
not.” He seemed to have forgotten that I had not yet paid him
anything.

We went again early next morning. The cooler
air was transparent. The old couple was once again with us.

My own stirrings began to struggle, and I
wondered whether there would somehow be someone for me today. The
guide did not know, but sooner or later there would be, he had told
me, even though I knew no names beyond the famous.

“
I saw no one in the
mugshots,” I had told him.

“
Not to worry, they were
all guilty.”

He gave me his binoculars and I saw Eichmann
fall for a second time, bloodying the brown dust of the trail; this
time the old couple shot the fleeing guide.

On the hike back the guide said softly,
“Well, you see. The variants may be endless, but these old ones
feel it may be a set number.”

“
How often have they shot
this one?” I asked.

“
Six times, but they hope
to get them all.”

“
They might always be
there,” he explained to me at the hotel, “to die in one variant and
wait for death in endless others.”

They did die, it seemed, and I felt that by
the logic of the assumptions we would not confront that individual
again, only new variants, however many; a large number, or an
infinity, bestowing the happiness of endless revenge on the
deserving.

A useless task, except for a punctuated
satisfaction, sufficient unto the moment, which I could not quite
accept when I learned this much. Today, in 2016, I told myself,
most of the hundred thousand or more who had never been caught were
either dead or near death, as were the thirty thousand…